Game of Thrones fans are going to 'hate' season 6, says Maisie Williams

'People are like: “I’m never watching again!” But they so are.'

I stopped trusting anything the Game of Thrones cast say long ago, but be that as it may, Maisie Williams made some pretty interesting comments about season 6 this week.

"Every year I think, “This is really cool.” But this year, as I opened the scripts, it’s so exciting because nobody knows what’s happening. They’re going to hate it, but love it, and I can’t wait,” she told EW.

Clearly taken aback by this, the magazine asked her why she thought people are going to hate the new season.

“Just that they don’t know what’s going to happen,” Maisie explained. “I know the showrunners don’t take [criticism] personally any more and that’s nice. People are outraged by last season, but they secretly love it too – because they don’t know what’s really going on.”

I guess she wasn’t so much saying the new episodes are bad then, obviously, but that by the very nature of modern TV discourse not everyone’s going to be happy.

"[The showrunners] are going to make the show they want to make, they interpret the books they way they interpret them, and that’s okay because that’s all they set out to do,” she said.

“They didn’t set out to make a replica of the books. I’m in love with the work they’ve done and I’m in love with the work George R.R. Martin has done – they’re different things. People are like: 'I’m never watching again!' But they so are.”

This all suggests that we can expect quite a big departure from George R. R. Martin’s vision of the story then, which was expected given this is the first season to leap ahead of the books.

Just to completely undermine these quotes, Maisie told us in February that the new season, arriving 24 April, “lives up to the hype”.